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Warnings Unheeded on School Tests

Here’s what we’re reading on this beautiful Columbus Day morning during which alternate-side rules are suspended, but the meters still demand to be filled!

A push for better numbers and greater accountability for student achievement created a system of educational testing that may have generated reams of data but very little clarity. Passing rates quickly rose, Jennifer Medina writes in a long investigation of New York’s approach to school testing policy, and then fell even more quickly, a result of a decade of policy missteps and unheeded red flags. Score inflation came as tests were released each year to better prepare the next year’ students. In this way, the school system in New York has gone from a national model for educational reform to a perhaps cautionary tale for other systems looking for salvation in data.

“Teachers began to know what was going to be on the tests,” said Prof. Howard T. Everson of the City University of New York’s Center for Advanced Study in Education. “Then you have to wonder, and folks like me wonder, is that real learning or not?” [NYT]

Politics & Government

Carl P. Paladino could not have picked a worse time to make impolitic statements about gays. Mr. Paladino told Orthodox Jewish leaders in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Sunday that children should not be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t.” He also mocked Andrew M. Cuomo for marching in the gay pride parade. Another mistake: letting such intolerance be captured on video.

Mr. Paladino’s remarks come just days after the police announced the torture of three men by a gang that believed them to be gay and a month after a student at Rutgers University jumped off the George Washington Bridge after two classmates broadcast his sexual encounter with a man over the Internet. [NYT (Also see The Daily News and The New York Post.)]

At the same time, The Post’s Fredric U. Dicker, whose video-taped confrontation with Mr. Paladino became a local political viral hit, reports that the candidate may be considering a new line of attack on Mr. Cuomo: that he is anti-Semitic. [The New York Post]

Meanwhile, Mr. Cuomo and the Rev. Al Sharpton continue their icy pas de deux, though there appear to be signs of a thaw in the relationship between the two Democrats. [Daily News]

And one question hangs over the New York gubernatorial campaign for Italian-Americans: Is the race shattering stereotypes, or simply reinforcing them? [NYT]

Transportation

The first day of new bus service along First and Second Avenues up to 125th Street in Manhattan ran into a few snags in the form of thoroughly befuddled passengers. The buses, new curbside pay kiosks and dedicated lanes on the street may all be intended to speed up two of the most congested transit routes in the city, but on its first day in operation on Sunday, confused riders were causing more delays than the new system alleviated. [NYT]

Putting a box on your bike continues to catch on as the Dutch attempt to recolonize Manhattan slowly but surely by using sleeper cells of avid cargo bicyclists. [Daily News; previously on City Room.]

People & Neighborhoods

“Stop snitching” has apparently made its way to Scarsdale, N.Y., as both students and their parents have adopted a “code of silence” since a brawl erupted among high schoolers at a Labor Day weekend party. [NYT]

People like it when the date makes a nice pattern, as it did on Sunday: 10/10/10. Weddings and gambling ensued. [NYT]

Great piece on the testing mess and the way the I am the Mayor for life and too bad the people twice voted for term limits Bloomberg and the totally incompetent, unqualified, uncertified lawyer masquerading as an educator Klein have tgried to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes how wonderful their “reforms” have been.

Their “reforms” have hurt a lot of good, decent people as well as done nothing to improve the educdation of the kids. How many teachers, who have given their total dedication to their work and have done as good a job as possible have been branded as failures by these two know nothings on the basis of these flawed exams? Same holds true for Principals and the way they have closed schools that have served their communities for generations.

The article also does not begin to touch the scandal of the once proud New York State high school Regents exam where at last count on the Integrated Algebra regents exam (the re-introduction of which was forced on the state after their miserable failed experience with garbage known as Math A), a score in the vicinity of 34% is considered passing (along with ridiculous guidelines for grading and also to allow schools to grade their own papers where the possibility of bonuses exist or sanctions if passing grades are not high enough, a total recipe for deceitfulness). No wonder Bloomberg and Klein can use results such as this to brag how they’ve improved the graduation rates. And is it any wonder these wonderful “graduates” are forced to take remedial courses at CUNY to try to get them to a level where they can do college level worki?

Of course the purpose of standardized exams and the Regents exams was never intended to be used to grade schools, teachers and Principals. They were meant to provide assistance in developing programs to assist kids. Not to be punitive in nature.

But I suspect in the next day or two, we will once again see Bloomberg and Klein trying to explain that they are right and the rest of the world is wrong. That their wonderful “reforms” have led to improved education for the kids of this city; a claim that has been shown to be as phony as a $3 bill.

But this too will be forgotten when the unqualified lawyer masquerading as an educator gets up to announce the next wave of schools to be closed or the number of teachers being denied tenure or whatever based on these fraudulent results. And the editorial writers of many of the papers, the NY Times included will no doubt cheer them on.

I’m struck by the similarities, in terms of dire results, between the testing debacle and the current scandals in law enforcement in this city caused by a similar numbers-driven approach. Stop-and-frisk at one end and sit-and-cram at the other. We’re in for a lot of misery.

The question I have is, “Is standardized testing a true measure of a society’s values, worth, and educational progress?” There are other ways to test, measure and to ultimately learn. Teachers are trapped in a system that tries to test them for success, when we all know that nothing is a real proof of life concept except for real life experience and impact on culture. We need to be making schools that affect the community, that don’t just put kids in a box for twelve years and expect them come out finished.

Talk about burying the lede. This is all you have to know about the situation and is the starting point for a real discussion:

“Eighth graders who scored at least a 3 on the state math exam had only a 50 percent chance of graduating from high school four years later with a Regents diploma, which requires a student to pass a certain number of tests in various subjects and is considered the minimum qualification for college readiness. ”

I don’t care how you tested them, we are failing in being able to graduate children who will become citizens. What percentage of NYC children will:

1- Finish high school
2- Have access to and keep a full time job
3- NOT have a child in a non-marital circumstance
4- NOT be involved with the criminal justice system?

Following is a quote from WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show in August, when Harvard Professor Daniel Koretz commented bluntly on No Child Left Behind and the current ferment over education reform:

David Brancaccio: “This is all being played out within the context of NCLB, as it used to be called, as first designed, that required schools to show adequate yearly progress on tests. Do you think what we’re seeing in New York with the easier tests and what’s happened here is sort of an outgrowth of that mentality?”

Daniel Koretz: Well, it started before NCLB. NCLB incorporated into federal policy trends that had been going on in state policy for quite a long time. But I’m glad you asked the question because I think it’s important to look beyond New York. NY is clearly a somewhat extreme case, it was in many ways a perfect storm.

But the problems that the New York experience have revealed are widespread. And they stem from I think a simplistic model of how to make schools better, a model that pretends to be but really isn’t a business model, which is that you just pick a few tests as an indicator of performance, reward or punish people based on that and assume that that’s going to be enough to improve the quality of education. And we now have twenty years worth of studies that show that that’s just not so, it’s too simple a model.

And I think that what NCLB codified was the notion that you could set what were essentially absolutely arbitrary targets for how much a teacher was to improve her or his students’ performance and that somehow magically they would be able to do that. And in some cases, they simply can’t. Either the supports aren’t there, or the required increase is simply implausibly large, impractically large. And if you tell people that they have to make impractically large increases in test scores they will — they just won’t do it by doing the things that you want.

So, I think what we need to do is to think about ways — more complicated ways, unfortunately — to set more reasonable targets for school improvement and to make things beyond tests count.

That’s not an anti-testing position. The progenitors of modern standardized testing warned users sixty years ago that standardized tests are not enough to evaluate schools. They’re an important piece of it but they’re not all of it.

I think what we need to do as we’re talking about, as a nation, reauthorizing NCLB and modifying it, is step back and say what do we really want to see when we walk into a classroom? What are the most important things that we want to see? And all of the things that make it to the top of the list have to count in an accountability system if we’re going to make schools better. If we tell teachers, that, “Oh, yeah, all those other things are important, but we’re not actually going to measure them or make them count, all that counts is a huge increase in tests scores” — we’ll get is a huge increase in test scores.

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